Thursday, June 21, 2012

The concept of choice as a representation of freedom is an illusion. To
prove this all I need to do is ask you to choose to be
hungry...........now. Its impossible. Hunger is controlled by
something primeval. something that existed before you did, therefore
you have no control over it. Because if you did, with your limited
abilities, you would muddle up the timing, the amount of food for
satisfaction, etc. you would kill yourself from simply not knowing how
to control hunger, therefore you can not control it, and as such you can
not choose to have it or not. when you eat because of hunger, you are
simply REACTING to it. So as far as hunger is concerned, you never
choose to eat, you only react to hunger telling you to.

This logic can be applied to ANY desire we have as humans, and it just so happens that desires are the only thing we have.

everything
we do is simply a reaction to a desire. and like hunger, these desires
existed long before we were. as we live our lives and react to our
environment, we simple discover them. to prove this all I need to do is
ask you to like something you don't like ...........now. Ok I will be
fair, You can dislike something you like, but you have to do
it.......now. Were you able to? No of course not. this means, like
hunger or sleep, all our desires, even our most personal ones that we
hold closest to our hearts, that we use to define who we are, that we
use to express to people our uniqueness.....they all existed before we
were and are controlled but something besides us. (please understand I
use the word "us" so lightly, I mean who the hell are "us" anyway?)

You never chose to like blueberries. You never decided rap music
wasn't for you. You only reacted to a desire that expressed itself when
you happened to eat a blueberry, or listen to rap music. And this
desire isn't simply "I like rap music", these desires are not
quantifiable in any way. they are the meat and bone, the sweat and
blood, the air and earth, they are everything, and it so happens that
within your little puny organic structure, the slow beat, the deep bass,
the hard voice of rap music satisfies one of them. Or it doesn't.

Whatever the result, you didn't choose it.

so how does this relate to communication?

simple.
Since every choice we make is in actuality only a reaction to a desire,
when you say something to someone, and they say "i understand" unless
what you said is satisfactory to one of their desires, and that desire
caused them to react with the words "I understand" they do not
understand what you MEAN, they only understand the words you spoke.

by speaking to someone you could say you are giving someone an
opportunity to choose to understand what you say or not, but since there
is no choice, only reactions to our desires, the only way someone will
understand what you say is if what you say satisfies one of their
desires and causes them to react with the words "i understand". any
other time the words "i understand" are being spoken they are empty,
because the words you spoke are not satisfactory.

Even when you speak words that are satisfactory to someone's
desires, and the desire causes the person to say "i understand", the
desire within you that caused you to speak could be different from that
person's desire that caused them to say "I understand" and there just
happened to be enough in what you said that satisfied them. therefore,
because of this discrepancy, there is never a time where you can safely
say that someone understands you perfectly.

The only way this discrepancy could be weaken is by SEEING actions,
over an indeterminate period of time, that satisfy the desire that
caused you to speak, from the person who confesses to understand.

Because
of all these discrepancies: the intricate differences between desires
that make up each individual, AND the ignorant way in which we use
language, It is near impossible to ever be certain anyone understands
you at any point in your life. Good luck.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

If I ever write a book, it will carry the same title as this article. I feel this title embodies (whatever the hell that weird word means) every single idea, theory, and muse my brain has created.

If there were words that follow the title, you know, a catch phrase that gives a glimpse into what the book holds, maybe they would read like: "The illusion of words" This I am still working on.

But what do I mean by "your boyfriend is a foreigner"?

Imagine this situation.

There is a guy from England. He speaks perfect Korean. He has a Korean girlfriend.

They are dating because they connected through music. They met at a concert and both saw each other dancing to the same song and after much conversation, many more similar interests were revealed.

It is a healthy relationship, they talk, they play, they fuck, they fight.

But they fight over things other couples don't. The girl gets frustrated because he doesnt understand her on her cultural level. Even though he speaks Korean perfectly, there is still a culture gap. On his side too. She doesnt understand his English culture. So although there is perfect verbal communication going on between them, a lot of what they MEAN gets lost in cultural ignorance. In order for them to have a successful relationship, this gap has to be given the correct respect and understanding.

This is understandable. It would be very detrimental to your well being as a tourist to go to a foerign country and get mad at people for not understanding you. Regardless to their preficiency in your native tongue. When culture is involved, there seems to be a huge girth of forgiveness with meaning comprehension.

So then why do men and women in general not seem to understand each other? Why is there a huge business built around this expert sharing his idea or this show expressing its idea about the man woman gap. Even if you are paired up with someone who not only speaks your language natively but also grew up in your community and therefore shares your culture as intimately as you, there is still miscommunication with each others intended meanings.

Why is that?

It appears culture (as we understand it) and language (as we understand it) are not as important as they are made out to be with communication.

If that is so, what is really happening when miscommunication happens between a couple?

How can I understand perfectly what you are saying, but have no idea what you mean?

The reason I feel this could be the title of a book if there ever were one is because I feel all the ideas I have expounded upon in the blog can be related somehow to the hypothesis that would become the answer to the above questions.

I will save you and me the time of writing and then reading a book and will now shortcut to the answer.

Just like a group of "koreans" make up Korean culture, a group of whatever you feel a human is, makes up each person's individual culture. So although you speak the same language as your lover just like our proverbial couple above did, by just being yourself, you automatically have a different culture from evey single person you will ever meet, and just like the English boyfriend didn't understand his Korean girlfriend's culture because he wasn't raised Korean, your boyfriend/friend/mother don't understand your culture because they weren't raised you. Your boyfriend truly is a foreigner.

Every couple should have the same girth of forgiveness for each other as do natives of a certain country with foreigners. This girth will become thinner and thinner as time passes because it will become expected from each other to understand just from the sheer amount of time spent together. the sheer amount of experience shared.

This all seems logical. by now, no one reading this has yet donked their head in utter disbelief with anything I have said. But no one in the world can say "no" to "have you ever gotten frustrated with someone for not understanding you?" That is the duality I can write a book about. How obvious we don't understand. How close our hands are over our eyes yet we ask who turned the lights out. How we are standing over a freshly baked apple pie and yet we ask what smells so good. How we feel the fart seep out our asses yet we question our neighbor about the foul smell.

When you meet someone, and you say "I like movies" the actual meaning expressed to the recipient with those words is equal to a dogs bark. Every single person you talk to has no idea what you mean with anything you say. All they understand is what you say. With time and patience people can learn and hopefully understand the meaning your culture attaches to the words that come out of your mouth, but as far as that meaning is concerned, every person you meet is a foreigner.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Culture, like every other word that rolls of the human tongue, is so
culturally loaded it is almost pointless to attach any emotion to it,
unless that emotion is born from your own individual perspective, but
since words can be changed and given meaning at will by the person who
speaks them, I can say perspective is another way of saying the culture of
one thing. but since culture is just another word, and words are just culturally loaded nothings, then the individual culture of the word culture is loaded with culture.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Try to imagine the world before the concepts of natural selection were accepted as a possibility.
It is hard because even if you don't accept its concepts as a possible truth, you see it everywhere.

Its reach has extended to nearly every corner of this world. From science to entertainment.

Movies have borrowed its concepts, culture has used it to fuel many debates.

It is so intertwined with our everyday lives it feels like it was never NOT around.

but there was a time in the not too distant past when its concepts were just a bunch of random papers written by random people floating around the world without any interlinking connection comprehensible to the human mind......Until someone asked a question.

Now this is all my speculation (which I think is the most effective tool we have as self-conscious entities in our endeavors for improvement) but Natural Selection could have been born from the simple question of "why do domestic animals have characteristics so drastically different (monstrosities) from their wild counterparts?"

Lets not stumble over particulars here. The actual question is not key here, only the Act of questioning.

And here is why:

Asking a question and the interconnecting brainpower that ensues afterwards in pursuit of the answer can effect amazing things.

Question - why do domestic animals have characteristics so drastically different from their wild counterparts?

Answer - The hand of man selected characteristics that benefited him in his environment, and bred further animals in that direction.

Intermediary Inter-connective realization(which leads to the next question) - Man selection of the animal kingdom has been going on since the most primitive of men existed and it has always been based only on the immediate benefit of man in his current economical situation, so it doesn't seem plausible that Man knew then anymore than they do now that from their methodical trails of selecting characteristics based on purely superficial results that our current domestic animal monstrosities would result from their much more simple "truer form" ancestors.

Question - If man had no forsight, no way of knowing how their selected animals would eventually end up looking, Why did the animals end up looking that way?

Answer - there might be something going on inside each animal, beyond the visual eye and comprehensible brain of man, that facilitated and built upon each selection man made of them.

Question - If man was the executive deciding force behind what gets selected and deselected during the eventual physical mutation of wild animal to domestic, What is the force behind the change that is happening on the level man was not aware of?

Answer - Well if it isn't man, or the animals themselves, all that is left is nature.

Another IIR - By taking what I know about the Law of Correlation which I learned from another paper and combining it with this new concept of Chaos Theory that seems to be gaining popularity, I think there might be an underlying connection with what we already know about the criteria used my Man when he selects the best breed from his stock and how Nature might select the best breed from the species. Differences being Nature has a purpose unique from Man, and also has a different environment wherein to make judgements of what to select.

The point of the above series of questions was not to present a viable hypothesis about how natural selection came about. It was to illustrate that by the simple process of asking a question, thinking and studying about it, our brains can take all the data we know and come out with a logical answer. Whether that answer stands the scrutiny of everyone who hears it is another topic all together. I am stating that the spark to an answer's flame that could potentially burn a new path into history is simply.....questioning.

It is amazing how a little vocal go around can really clear things up in your head.

I had this idea about how freedom, choice etc. are all human constructs and hold no place in Nature. But I had no idea how to take all the random pieces of string in my head and tie them together to form an easy to follow idea...until I tried to explain my idea to someone. Just by getting the words out with my mouth, I quickly figured out where their rightful place was.

This is the result of my efforts.

As long as we have "likes", "desires" in our lives, we will never be free. And since desires are the instigators of all our actions, freedom and choice are in fact false ideas we created for reasons I shall try to examine later.

Lets dig deeper into this logic with some examples:

You have never decided to be hungry. There was never a moment you were not hungry and then with the flick of your finger start hunger. It is a desire at the whim of our body that is ushered in by habits formed over countless years of evolution. You have no control over it. Hunger controls you. You are never free from its grasp. If you ever eat because you are hungry, you are not CHOOSING to eat, you are just acting on the urge imposed from your desire to eat.

I like blueberries. I never chose to LIKE them. I just ate one and REALIZED I like them. I then discovered the depth of this "like" more and more as I continued to eat them. But there was never a moment I didn't like blueberries and then decide I liked them. This means my liking of blueberries existed for a time unknown to me, and I just came to understand it when I ate them. So now, every time I eat a blueberry, I am not CHOOSING to eat one, I am just letting this newly discovered desire manipulate me.

This goes for every desire we have, good or bad.

Since we never chose what our desires were and just realized them over the course of our lives, every action we take that can be connected to a desire is just an action born from the desire and therefore takes on all the characteristics of that desire, including not being a choice.

I am certain some people out there, upon hearing this, will instantly want to prove nature wrong and claim control over their lives. The easiest way to do this I presume would be by doing exactly what you don't like to do. Go against your desire. That way your action cannot be connected to your natural desires and it breaks free from the "No choice" progeny. But alas this is futile because the action of going against what you desire, regardless of how Buddhist it may sound, is in fact a desire. You desire to have no desires so you do things against what you naturally desire.

I would venture to say that as a living organism, it is impossible to act without desire. Desire is the stimulus to everything we do. Desire is a requisite for life on this earth. Therefore everything we do is connected to some desire, regardless to whether we are conscious of it or not, and therefore it takes on all the characteristics of a desire.

In summary, because we did not choose to have our desires, we don't choose to carry them out. we just react to their force. Therefore we have never been, and will never be free in respect of able to make choices.

The concept of freedom of choice is not real. I suspect we created ideas of choice and words like "choose", "decide" etc. to capsulize these ideas to somehow cope with our newly discovered conscious minds. But in reality, us "choosing" to eat chocolate ice cream over strawberry because we like it more, is no different from a lion "choosing" to attack a zebra over of deer because it is slower.